All about the United Kingdom’s national, regional and local press

Leicester Mercury

23 September 2013

The Leicester Mercury is a daily tabloid newspaper sold in the city of Leicester and the counties of Leicestershire and Rutland, including the towns of Coalville, Loughborough, Market Harborough, Hinckley and Melton Mowbray.

It was founded in 1874 as the Leicester Daily Mercury, but dropped the Daily in 1919.

It’s published by Leicester Mercury Group Ltd, part of Northcliffe Media – formerly the regional publishing arm of the Daily Mail and General Trust, but now a constituent of the Local World group. It’s produced from editorial offices in Leicester.

Up until 2006 it had local editions for each of the five towns mentioned above, but these were first consolidated into County East and County West editions, and now apparently only the one main edition appears. It still has reporting staff in each of the towns, though.

In December 2006 the Mercury became only the second newspaper in the Northcliffe group to obtain union recognition, when 79 per cent of staff voting favoured representation by the National Union of Journalists.

Until the spring of 2013 the Mercury‘s web presence was through Northcliffe’s thisisleicestershire.co.uk portal website. However, it now has its own website as a result of Local World’s decision to give all its newspapers “publisher-branded” sites.